IDC Financial Insights’ recently completed benchmarking of the maturity of Asia/Pacific banks (excluding Japan) confirms that more than 80% of these banks are still in early stages of the maturity model — the ad hoc and opportunistic stages. These banks are lagging behind their global peers when it comes to strengthening experience excellence for their products and services.

The symptoms of this deficiency are varied, ranging from their inability to keep pace with the changing needs and requirements of their demanding customers to how the current business and IT digital initiatives are disconnected and poorly aligned. To be sure, most of these banks are attempting to offer an omni-experience, but these are inconsistent and half-hearted and are prone to give way to other seemingly more important strategic imperatives (cost management or preservation of legacy processes, and so forth).

Thus, highlights the need for Asia/Pacific banks to improve their omni-experience by adapting better to the demands of the customer and technology changes.

Customers today are engaging in a myriad of omni-experiences involving social interactions, work relationships, and commerce, all enabled by personal and business digital interfaces. IDC Financial Insights expects that around 86% of the financial services customers in Asia/Pacific will be active on digital channels, of which 15% (a threefold growth from 5% in 2015) will be exclusively transacting on their channels by 2020. This has been nothing but a wakeup call for banks to improve these channels. Banks that disrupt or meet their target customer needs repeatedly will be able to attract and grow allegiance across the entire ecosystem — customers, employees, and partners.

“Several customer trends in the Asia/Pacific region will drive the pursuit of omni-experience excellence. Certainly, financial institutions must respond to the big shift toward multichannel interactions and how these interactions are increasingly integrated to customer lifestyle,” says Michael Araneta, Associate Vice President of IDC Financial Insights Asia/Pacific.

“Omni-experience is in the top 3 priorities of the banking sector in Asia/Pacific. Still, we see more than 80% of these banks in the early stages of the maturity model, much behind the United States, indicating that there is a large opportunity that can be captured by investing in digital transformation and creating superior customer engagement. Customers today expect banks to deliver easy, convenient, and consistent interactions across multiple channels,” adds Sneha Kapoor, Senior Research Manager for IDC Financial Insights.